or Blanquette! He had
been neglecting her. A girl of her age needed some amusement; we would
go to the Theatre, the Porte Saint-Martin, like good bourgeois, and see
a melodrama so that Blanquette could weep.

"They are playing 'Les Eventreurs de Paris.' I hear they rip each other
up on the stage and everybody is reeking with blood--good honest red
blood--carried in bladders under their costumes, my son. You turn up
what you can of your snub little superior artistic nose--but Blanquette
will be in Paradise."

Blanquette was in the slip of a kitchen and a flurried temper when we
entered.

"But, Master, you said you would not be home for dinner. There is
nothing in the house--only this which I was cooking for myself," and she
dived her fork into the pot and brought up on the prongs a diminutive
piece of beef. "And now you and Asticot demand dinner, as if dinners
came out of the pot of their own accord. Ah men! They are always like
that."

I put my arm round her waist. "We are all dining out together,
Blanquette; but if you don't want to come, you shall stay at home."

"And without dinner," said Paragot, taking the fork from her hand and
throwing the meat to Narcisse.

"_Ah, mais non!_" cried Blanquette, whose sense of economy was outraged.
But when Narcisse sprang on the beef and finding it too hot, lay
growling at it until it should cool, she broke out laughing.

"After all, it would have been very tough," she admitted.

"Then why in the sacred name of shoe leather were you going to eat it?"
asked Paragot.

"Food is to be eaten, not thrown away, Master," she replied
sententiously.

We took the omnibus and crossed the river and went up the Grands
Boulevards, an unusual excursion for Paragot who kept obstinately to the
Boulevard Saint-Michel and the poorer streets of the _quartier_,
through fear, I believe, of meeting friends of former days. A restaurant
outside the Porte Saint-Martin provided a succulent meal. The place was
crowded. Two young soldiers sat at our table, and listened awe-stricken
to Paragot's conversation and were prodigiously polite to Blanquette,
who, they discovered, was from Normandy, like themselves. And when they
asked, after the frank manner of their kind, which of us had the honour
to be the lover of Mademoiselle, and she cried with scarlet face, "But
neither, Monsieur!" we all shouted together and laughed and became the
best friends in the world. Happy country of fraternity! The little